It’s the time of year when writers turn to looking back and summing up, the better to put the work in the can and take a couple of weeks off for the holidays. In 25 years at the News-Journal I never reached enough seniority to take this week off, so I sympathize with the writers who are cranking it out while the rest of us rest — for example, the indefatigable Digby, who points out that Republicans spent almost 50 years trying to destroy reality but couldn’t succeed until they imported expertise from Russia on how to keep in power a government the majority of the population despises.
The result has been so toxic that people are turning to Democrats in the vain hope that those feckless wimps will right the ship of state (pro tip: They almost certainly can’t and won’t.) But because a Democrat won in Alabama, thanks to the Republicans nominating Satan’s younger, stupider brother, Democrats are eyeing a March special election in Pittsburgh’s southern suburbs as more evidence of an approaching blue wave in November. Once again, the Republicans have nominated a Christianist loonball for the race and Democrats have a young, “moderate” (meaning conservative) ex-Marine to carry the banner of the jackass in the district, which gave Trump 58% of its votes.
The Republicans, like the Democrats, just can’t stop themselves from following their worst instincts. For Democrats, that means feigning incompetence to keep the corporate money flowing. For Republicans, it means catering to the craziest common denominator, which means another Republican primary full of blood-letting looms, this time in Mississippi.
Turning to problems a few targeted assassinations can’t solve, Republican governance continues to produce the same chaos set loose in “Ghostbusters” when the EPA guy turns off the power grid: All the demons have been set loose. None is more destructive than Big Oil, which is celebrating its impending destruction of most life on earth by investing $180 billion in the construction of plastics factories, the better to destroy life in the ocean.
They hardly need bother. Global warming is doing a fine job all by itself, as evidenced by the closing of the Maine shrimp fishery for the fifth year in a row.